Bridge Commander 2 Discontinued due to CBS's updated licensing terms, We apologize for this inconvenience, and no refunds will be issued

The con artist in question, "Kenneth Emerson", made previous noises about CBS legal action due to the Axanar lawsuit. There are a number of explanations, each one laying the blame squarely at his door:

Possibility 1: CBS is shutting down all Trek fan projects and BC2 was an unfortunate casualty

The CBS licensing terms were very specific to fan-made film projects, with references to the quality of props used and actors employed.

Many fan-projects much further along, such as Star Trek Armada 3 and the various VR bridge releases have not been shut down.

Conclusion: Bogus

Possibility 2: CBS is shutting down fan projects that try to charge money

4 years ago Kenneth claimed that by removing the words "Star Trek" from in front of the name STBC2 that all IP issues would disappear, going as far as to insist that other posters not use the words when talking about the project. Even if he had removed all mentions of "Star Trek" from the project (which he didn't) anyone with an ounce of sense would know that having Federation, Borg, Klingon, etc ships flying around in a game still constitutes using the IP.

Bizarrely he updated his forum's terms & conditions with "YOU AGREE THAT YOU ARE IN NO WAY AFFILIATED WITH CBS, TOTALLY GAMES, PARAMOUNT OR OTHER SUBSIDIARY COMPANIES." as if that would act as a legal forcefield keeping them out.

If this possibility is the case there is the question of why no due diligence to see if CBS would allow this was carried out BEFORE charging people money.

Conclusion: Possible

Possibility 3: CBS did nothing and Kenneth stopped development due to other reasons

From the beginning there has been ample evidence that Kenneth was a beginner at development at best. The first show of this project made use of stolen models (once a thief, always a thief...) and it was deleted from moddb as a result. He made improbable claims on the Star Trek Excalibur board that he had created a DX9 engine from scratch that would allow "trillions of polygons" and "limitless detail" whilst simultaneously pestering the developers there to show him their code.

The media for his project showed a crude virtual starfield with imported models. In short, what you learn in the tutorial from Unity 3D.

Development had slowed to a crawl with updates coming further and further apart. What are the odds that after 4 years a project on the verge of death from lack of talent would coincidentally die from something completely unrelated?

Conclusion: Highly probable

Possibility 4: Regardless of the reasons for failure, Kenneth has stolen people's money.

Once BC2 returned from its initial banning due to plagiarism and theft, it instituted a very money-first approach. On the Facebook page every response to a post, no matter if the person was asking about content or features, ended with the invitation and link to give Kenneth money.

Kenneth took to twitter to troll random Star Trek actors for money and free plugs, even tweeting at people like Elon Musk asking for funding for BC2.

Make no mistake, NONE of that money was spent on the project. It consisted of freely available models in a royalty-free game engine. He didn't work on BC2 in lieu of a paying job. He didn't take any fee-paying courses on coding or design. There was no major investment, in time, money, or skill, in this project. It's like expecting to be paid for the game of Snake or Pacman you made inmessing around in RPGMaker.

All the fault lies with him, either for failing to check if it was ok with CBS to charge people money before taking it, or for not using any of that money to get a single professional who might have given the project a chance of success.

Conclusion: Definite

There's also the issue of HailingFrequency playing host to such an obvious scam and the users who viciously attacked people pointing out the flaws in the project whilst it was stealing their money.

Bridge Commander 2 Discontinued due to CBS's updated licensing terms, We apologize for this inconvenience, and no refunds will be issued, But if you email me your email address i'll be sure to keep you up to date on all future news regarding this or any other title that i work on.

Again, more shady behavior from this individual. I feel bad for the people who got scammed out of their money after donating to this individual. I hope people sue his ass for having scammed them out of their money. Kickstarter and Indiegogo both have rules on how funds should be handled if the project isn't "successfully funded" or otherwise not completed. People tried to warn about him (myself included), and people like Zach publicly silenced the BC2 critics for speaking out. Turns out, now we've been proven correct.